Tuesday, February 21, 2017

Do you
resist Lent? Do you see it as an imposition upon your routine? During Lent we
are presented with opportunities to engage in self-examination, repentance, fasting, and service. If you take on a Lenten discipline, will you come to resent it? If you
don’t, will you feel guilty?

For three
Saturdays in a row, St. Paul’s hosted a series called Islam 101. With over 180
people present each week, we learned about the history and basic tenets of
Islam and got to know a few Muslim neighbors in Whatcom County. The Muslim emphasis
on practice impresses me. To follow the five pillars of Islam means speaking
the Muslim confession of faith, praying five times daily, giving alms, fasting
during Ramadan, and making pilgrimage to Mecca at least once if possible.
Anyone who does these things is a Muslim.

But
Christians, at least those in the circles I run in, don’t have any absolutely
required practices. As the historical “shoulds” begin to fade from our
decreasingly Christian-dominant culture, it seems that we mark our Christian
identity by things that we think in their heads and believe in our hearts,
whether they affect our daily behavior or not. This is not the church the
apostles envisioned.

I want to
suggest that Lent is, indeed, an imposition. We mark it strongly on Ash
Wednesday with the imposition of ashes on our foreheads. The season of Lent beckons
to us urgently, whispering, “Life is short. How are you spending yours?” We
don’t believe that the purpose of life is to ensure a trip to heaven. Rather, our
life is the time God has given us to learn how to love. We cannot do this
merely in our heads—or even merely in our hearts, since love is not a feeling
but a way of life. We can only love in relationship with each other.

This year,
allow Lent to impose itself on you. Seek after God through prayer and self-denial.
This might mean changing your routine or adjusting your priorities. You can
commit to weekly church attendance and daily prayer, to acts of charity and
occasions for learning. You can engage in self-examination, in prayer, in
journaling, and in intentional humility. You can commit to full participation
in the services of Holy Week. If fasting is something you are capable of, give
it a try, especially on Good Friday. Make a practice of service by giving of your money, time, or talent.

But
understand that feelings of unworthiness, of not being “good enough,” do not
come from God. As Augustine of Hippo put it, “Our hearts are restless until
they find rest in you.” An invitation to deeper practice is just that—an
invitation. Failure to live up to a practice does not mean we have let God
down. Rather, it is a chance to accept the invitation again, always with the
assurance that God loves you infinitely and will never give up on you. Through
the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and not through any act of
your own, God has made you worthy of salvation. How will you live out that
immensely good news? And how will you share it this Lent?

I want you
all to think back to when you were kids. What if you heard your parents say
this? “You know, you probably shouldn’t run out into the street when there’s a
car coming. You might get a little bit hurt. And that hot stove? I wouldn’t
recommend touching it without a potholder. Your call, really, but it’s just a
suggestion.” What if your parents had said that?

Now let’s
imagine something different. What if your parents had said, “Here’s a list of 613
rules for you to follow. You have to keep every one of them, and never, ever
break one, even by accident. If you do break one, you’d better apologize right
away, because if you don’t, you’ll be grounded for the rest of your life.”

Which kind
of parent would you prefer? Which kind of parent is God more like?

What if God
were more like the permissive parent, setting the bar really low? What if God
said, “Well, here are some commandments. But they’re more like suggestions,
really. Do try to keep them. But if you don’t, well, no big deal. I’ll forgive
you”? I think most of us live our lives as if God were kind of like that. But a
quick glance at today’s readings tells us something very different, and more
than a little alarming!

Look, first,
at the impossible standard set by today’s psalm: “Happy are they whose way is
blameless, who walk in the law of the Lord … who never do any wrong, but always
walk in his ways.” Who are these people? Well, it may be helpful to know that Psalm
119 is a long acrostic poem: 22 stanzas, each of which contains eight verses,
each beginning with one of the 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet. This first
stanza contains the most basic theology, because in ancient times it may have
been the first one children were taught as a means of learning written
language. So the audience is children, the law of the Lord is the school
subject, and living blamelessly fulfills the learning rubric.

Psalm 119
points to the Law of Moses: that is, the Torah, the first five books of the
Bible. In Jesus’ time, the scribes interpreted the Bible like constitutional
lawyers, and the priests managed procedures for making restitution when laws
were broken. But at the center was a basic understanding, which we heard just
now from the apocryphal Book of Sirach: “If you choose, you can keep the commandments.” God is good,
and God’s Law shows us how to be good. We have free will, so let’s choose to be
good like God. Easy, right?

Under a
systematic, codified approach, people of relative privilege like the Pharisees
could keep most of the rules most of the time. Some rules about purity were
inevitably breached periodically, and then there would be certain animal sacrifices,
so that citizens could be accepted back into the community. But the poorest of
all couldn’t afford the sacrifices, which placed them forever outside the
community of God’s people. And those with physical disabilities like blindness,
or with chronic diseases like leprosy, were caught in the same trap, with no
recourse. These were left behind, shut out, kept from the promised benefits of
society. We have such people today as well, don’t we?

Jesus loved
the Law and the Temple, but he also saw that the system had become abusive,
focused more on correctness than on mercy … and this made him angry. We might
expect Jesus to say, “You know all those rules that the Pharisees use to
oppress the poor? They don’t matter at all! Break them. Make your own rules. Just
be groovy and love each other—that’s all God wants.” We often think of Jesus’ message
as being rather like this, because he did break some of the rules repeatedly—I’m
thinking especially of the Sabbath, and of purity codes regarding women and
people with diseases. But instead, in this excerpt from the Sermon on the Mount,
Jesus says something like this:

“Of course murder
is against the law, but is it so hard not to commit murder? I say that even if
you are angry with someone, you might as well have killed the person! If you say,
‘You idiot,’ you deserve to be thrown on the garbage heap! Adultery is wrong,
but if you even fantasize about it, then you’ve already done it! So if your eye
wanders into lust, pluck it out! If your hand wants to strike someone, cut it
off!” Jesus certainly has our attention, but now he sounds rather like the God
of 613 laws. Now what do we do?

Well, let me
ask if you this in all honesty: Have you ever broken a law? Ever gone four
miles over the speed limit? Ever downloaded digital content that you didn’t pay
for? Ever lied to cover your tracks? Ever stretched the definition of what the
money was earmarked for? Ever backstabbed a friend? Ever promised to do
something and then didn’t? Show of hands for any or all of the above?

Want a good series of books about how difficult it isto be a moral person? Read A Series of Unfortunate Events.Source: Flickr

Not all of
these things are directly comparable, of course, but what’s clear is that we’re
all in the same sinking ship. We don’t typically teach this to kids right off
the bat. But in his book The End,
children’s author Lemony Snicket writes, “It is very difficult to make one’s
way in this world without being wicked at one point or another, when the
world’s way is so wicked to begin with.”

I think of
Jean Valjean, the protagonist in Les
Miserables, who steals a loaf of bread to feed his starving family, gets
caught, and winds up serving 19 years on the chain gang. Immediately upon his
release, out of desperation, he steals again, this time from a bishop. And then
that bishop shows Jean Valjean both mercy and grace, and in so doing, he changes
a criminal into a saint.

We teach our
children to follow rules, and well we should. But I hope we don’t stop there.
As they get older, hopefully we teach them that there are many kinds of rules,
and that some are more important than others, and that some are enforced more rigidly
than others, and that some change over time, and that some rules conflict with
each other, and that some people live in situations that make certain laws very
difficult not to break, and that
there have been times in history, even in our own country, when our laws were
so bad that those of good conscience absolutely had to break them!

All of this must
follow, yes. But first, we teach children that law and order is important. Jesus
isn’t throwing away this basic truth. God has standards. The thing is, it seems
that God’s standards are way too high for us to live up to.
And ironically, sometimes the mere presence of rules can make us prone to
breaking them. “See this delicious-looking fruit? Don’t eat it!”

Paul writes extensively about this in the Letter to the
Romans: if law and order could save us, it would have done so a long time ago. God
has given us free will because love must be chosen freely. You’ve heard it
said, “You can’t legislate morality,” right? It’s true: no rule can force us to
love God, and no rule can force us to show mercy and compassion to others.

When we encounter people living outside the bounds of
society’s laws or of our interpretation of God’s laws, how do we treat them? Are
we eager to learn why a person has broken a rule? Do we know if they had a
choice? If so, do we have a full understanding of the factors that went into
that choice? Do we know what might drive people to make different decisions
than we ourselves would make? Can we understand why another person might
prioritize the rules differently than we would? Only when we seek that depth of
understanding can justice be tempered by and strengthened through mercy and
grace.

Truly, as
Jesus did make clear on other occasions, the only law is love, and all other good
laws, whether religious or civil, can teach us how to tackle the one law. So
what does God expect of us, really?

Thomas
Powers, onetime contributing editor to the Atlantic
Monthly, told this story many years ago: “The composer [Igor] Stravinsky
had written a new piece with a difficult violin passage. After it had been in
rehearsal for several weeks, the solo violinist came to Stravinsky and said he
was sorry, he had tried his best, the passage was too difficult, no violinist
could play it. Stravinsky said, ‘I understand that. What I am after is the
sound of someone trying to play it.’”

God doesn’t
expect perfection, but sincerity and true repentance. Following the Law is all
well and good. But trying to follow the Law and failing? Sometimes, with God’s
help, that can be even better. Our inevitable failure to follow the Law is steeped
in God’s grace. God cares more about how much we care than about how lawful we are.

Jesus knew
the Law of Moses inside and out, and he loved it and lived by it. He didn’t
abolish it; he refocused it on love, and in so doing, Jesus held a mirror up to
all his people, whether or not they believed themselves to be sinners. Jesus raised
the bar so high that none of us can ever jump it! And that’s good news, because
it means we can let go of perfectionistic judgment. It means we don’t have to
be afraid anymore. We can use the rules to grow! And once perfectionists like
me get that into our thick skulls, God can finally, really get to work in our
lives.

So don’t
avoid hell by keeping the rules more stringently. Rather, embrace heaven by
trusting in God’s love more deeply. And when you fail—and you will, again and
again—be gentle with yourself, and be gentle with others. Sometimes we just
mess up, and then we need both justice and mercy. Sometimes we commit great
acts of evil and need God’s justice and mercy all the more. But sometimes we
break rules because we didn’t see any other way forward, and then we need grace
from God and, more tangibly, from each other. You have your own stories; learn
the stories of rulebreakers you don’t understand.

“If you
choose, you can keep the
commandments.” God gives the growth. Trust that you will grow, and that the
people you love will grow, and that your enemies will grow. With God in charge,
growth is inevitable. It’s in the tough, heartbreaking work of trying and
failing and growing and trying again that life becomes joyful, love becomes
real, and the Kingdom of God comes more clearly into view. Amen.